Heaven is a Place on Earth: Why Everything You Do Matters to God
Michael E. Wittmer
Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Zondervan (May 1, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0310253071
ISBN-13: 978-0310253075
Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
Buy Here: amazon.com

One of the verses I have struggled with comes at the end of 1 Corinthians 15:

“So, my dear brothers and sisters, be strong and immovable. Always work enthusiastically for the Lord, for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless.” (v. 58)

Why the confusion? Because this is how Paul ends his argument for the reality of the resurrection. The reason our work is not useless is because Christ has risen. What does the resurrection have to do with how we go about our day-to-day lives? Our vocations, our leisure, mowing the grass- it all matters, according to Paul, but why? My two favorite books from last year spoke to this- “Surprised by Hope,” by N.T. Wright, talks of the new heavens and new earth as the Christian hope. He focuses on the eschatological realities. “Culture Making,” by Andy Crouch, talks about the reality of our creative calling to produce culture, not just critique it and ignore it, but that we should actively engage it.

Michael Wittmer’s book “Heaven is a Place on Earth: Why Everything You Do Matters to God” takes the best of these two books and puts it into one- and oddly enough it was written 4 years previous to the other two. Wittmer argues for the “tremendous dignity and value of everyday life” by “taking you from Creation to the Fall, to Redemption, and to glimpses from the book of Revelation” (book description on the back). Wittmer’s goal is to get us to view all of life through the Christian worldview. That is, to view everything through the lens of Biblical Christianity. The result is one of the best books on “the Christian life” that I have read to date. Wittmer gets it.
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This blog post is a look at a pervasive theme in American culture that has crept into the Church at large. I am not saying this is true of every church that gathers for worship in the United States, but is something that I have noticed is a particular struggle of ours. By ours, I am placing myself squarely in my own sights.

The idea of individualism permeates American culture, if indeed we can summarize only one collective culture. Many of us dream of being the hero- the person who takes an impossible situation on our own back, beat the odds, and win the acclaim of those we save. We stress self-reliance. We relish independence. We promote our own agenda above that of others. We look out for number one, as they say. Unfortunately, this ideology also permeates the American Church.
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One of the most defining moments in Israel’s history is the Exodus. In this event, God himself takes his chosen people out of the bondage of slavery under the Egyptians and pushes forward the next phase of his redemptive program by turning them into a nation. Within this defining event is yet another highly cherished event to the Israelites, as Moses goes up onto Mount Sinai and meet with God. It is here that he receives God’s law, the ten commandments, and the blueprints of the tabernacle that they are to build. The tabernacle is central, literally and spiritually, to Jewish life in the Exodus as it stands in the middle of the camp, symbolizing God’s special presence.
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You can find out about Tim Challies’ recent conversion at his blog.

A while back, I wrote a post entitled Redeeming Twitter for the Kingdom. I began with the statement that Christians should engage culture, with the mindset of redeeming aspects of the culture for God’s kingdom. My thoughts about cultural engagement were stirred again today by a remark by Daniel Montgomery, teaching pastor of Sojourn Community Church, in his sermon on Genesis 3 today. In a passing comment, Daniel spoke of the effect of Adam and Eve’s giving in to the serpent’s temptation as being transformational of the culture of Genesis 1 and 2. Namely, the culture of Adam and Eve living in communion with and love for God, along with Adam’s calling to cultivate the garden for the glory of God, all came crashing down with the first sin. In it’s place came a culture of alienation and fear of God, judgment, and shame.

It is in the story of the fall that we see cultural engagement. God is in the business of redeeming culture, as we will see, and that thread is woven throughout Scripture. Now, before anyone says anything, I am not claiming that this is a major tenet of belief on par with the Gospel. The main idea of the narrative is personal fall into sin, judgment, and the promise of redemption. But as Paul says in the Christ hymn of Colossians 1, God is working through Christ to reconcile all things to himself, and certainly culture is part of all things. There is a general movement in Scripture from the garden to a city, from Genesis to Revelation, where the original culture of the garden is again a reality. In fact, it is even better, because there will be no chance of this new culture being subverted.
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If you have been around the blogosphere for any amount of time, you have probably heard of the term “contextualization.” The term has been thrown around by Christian theologians for a while now, but has come into prominent use in the last few years. But what is contextualization? Why is it necessary?
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I just read a fascinating article at washingtonpost.com entitled “I’m still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq.” The author was a senior interrogator during the Iraq war who was responsible for the capture of “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war.” In this article he details how he captured al-Zarqawi by refusing to use the methods that were being regularly employed by the army, and instead chose to focus “on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information.”

I highly recommend the article.

As Christians, we are called to engage the culture- using what is good for the kingdom and rejecting that which is bad. In light of this, Christians should take notice of the increase of interest in social media- aspects of the internet that are used to build community (whether perceived as real or not). This should give us notice as one of the fundamental tenets of Christianity is that of community and the unbelieving world is essentially crying out for a communal need, attempting to find it wherever they can. One of the biggest examples of social media is what you are reading right now: blogs. Other examples include link aggregation sites such as delicious.com, and social sites such as facebook.com. [if you are a member of facbook, you can join my blog's network.] One of the social media sites that has risen to popularity is the site twitter.com. This blog post will look at ways Christians can engage twitter for the kingdom.
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